Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Webjet Limited FY 2023 Results Briefing. Participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. John Guscic, Managing Director. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Rachel. Like a Porsche with no brake, Webjet is unstoppable. Thank you for joining the Webjet FY 2023 results presentation. Joining me today is Tony Ristevski, our CFO. Let's get stuck into the results. Six months ago, we forecasted in FY 2024 we would exceed pre-COVID profitability. We've done it six months earlier. In the second half of FY 2023, we were more profitable than in pre-pandemic period. We've done it purely on organic business growth. We've achieved it even after closing two business units in GoSee Cruise Division and Webjet Exclusives, all of which are included in the pre-COVID compare. We have overcome FX headwinds of circa $3 million in the second half. We've dealt with a stagnating airline capacity in Australia.
In that environment, Webjet has delivered bookings increase of 30% to 3.92 million bookings. TTV up 15% to $2.2 billion. Revenue up 4% for $188.7 million. Most importantly, EBITDA up 17% to $62.3 million, a significant increase over both pre-COVID and last year metrics. If we move to Slide 3. For the full year, we can see that group bookings and TTV are above pre-pandemic levels, as the first half did have the knock-on effects of the Omicron virus impacting our performance. For the full year, bookings are up 7 are up 115% versus last year at 7.36 million. TTV is up 165% versus last year at $4.34 billion.
Revenue is up 164% at $364.4 million. There's a $150 million turnaround in the EBITDA number, where we delivered $134.8 million. We move to Slide 4. We can talk about the EBITDA turnaround of $150 million. It's actually more than that on a constant currency basis, where we would have delivered $139.8 million. Total cash is sitting above half a billion at $514 million. That's after we've repaid our bank debt of $86 million. As we said, our business is well ahead on a full year basis at an activity level, which is the greatest measure of what we can do on behalf of our consumers and our customers.
All three business units were profitable, with WebBeds delivering $117.1 million in EBITDA. The Webjet OTA business delivered $43.4 million of EBITDA, and GoSee delivered $1.6 million. Let's get into a little bit more detail as we explore what we did to achieve these results. Moving on to Slide 6. Did you ever question our B2B strategy? Did you ever wonder why we pivoted to being a hotel wholesaler? Did you ever see in your dreams all the castles in the sky? Tell me why WebBeds builds castles in the sky. Tell me why the castles are way up high. WebBeds has had a stunning second half in 2023. Bookings are up 63% against pre-COVID.
That's a reflection of everything we've done to increase our addressable market and in particular build out solutions for the North American marketplace, and in particular, part of a recovery of the APAC market in the fourth quarter of the financial year. We're TTV 31% up for the half against pre-pandemic levels. This is a reflection, at a lower rate than bookings, obviously as lower average booking values are coming through, and that's due to the changing business mix of our growth markets in North America in particular. Revenue is 34% ahead of pre-pandemic levels. Most importantly, a phenomenal EBITDA result, which is up 130% on pre-pandemic or $30 million higher than we delivered in the second half of 2019. Moving to Slide 7.
For the full year, you can see that all of our key metrics are ahead of pre-pandemic levels. Bookings are up 36%, TTV is up 9%, revenue is up 4%, EBITDA is up 22%. Over the course of the full year, our expenses were lower than pre-pandemic, representing the scalable effect of the business transition, which I'll talk about in a little while. The thing that we are most pleased with in our result is that we are now 50% more efficient on an FTE basis per booking. We are confident that we can improve that in FY 2024 and beyond. As we deliver each of our results and when we get back to a normal environment, we continue to see EBITDA margins that are truly world-class within the broader WebBeds business.
We delivered an EBITDA margin of 49.5% in the second half, which is up 16% on pre-pandemic levels or roughly 700 basis points. It's a reflection of a business that is continuing to substantially outperform its competitive base. It's expanding its addressable market, and we're executing and delivering all that on a lower cost per booking transaction than we ever have in history. Which brings us to the next step in the evolution of our WebBeds business. In a break with our 10-year tradition, we are no longer set-setting percentage profitability targets. Just like Z, 8/3/5 is dead. Why are we doing this? Well, our market opportunity has changed. Our competitive landscape is different, and our solutions have evolved.
As I made reference earlier, in particular, we have looked at specific market opportunities like North America, and we've built our unique offerings in that marketplace. That's changed the fundamentals of the economic drivers of our business. If you see, that our second half expenses are higher than first half, they're driven by bookings growth of 63%, a changed element of how we capture new markets. In those numbers, you'll see that our EBITDA margin is up. Sorry, revenue TTV margin is up and expenses are up. That's a reflection of Merchant of Record business, which is a key driver of our growth in the fourth quarter, in which we capture the credit card payment as part of revenue and expense it out of our business in the second line.
The consequence being both are inflated, which contributes to our thought processes of why 8/3/5 needs to be disposed of as a metric because the opportunity has changed for us. What are we going to continue to do for our ongoing business to give comfort around our substantially growing business? Well, what we're going to do is exactly what we've done in the second half of 2023. We're going to focus on growing our absolute EBITDA numbers, and that is going to be the driver and the key metric that we'll be focused on as a business going forward. If we move to Slide 8. Nowhere is this more transparent than in the bookings growth profile for FY 2023. Our customer segmentation and geographic expansion have contributed to sequential increases in bookings and TTV compared to pre-COVID.
At a bookings level, we've been ahead of pre-COVID for over 12 months, and our outperformance is only accelerating. According to IATA, for the full year, international or the global air passenger market is a long way from pre-pandemic levels and is averaging at 75%. If we go to the exit run rate, it's circa 85%. Yet WebBeds has been ahead of pre-pandemic levels, at a booking since May of 2022. We are in a position where we are well above market growth. As that market growth continues to return to normality, we will accelerate our growth on a factor of that reversion to normal.
In addition, we will continue to do what we have done, which is grow market share, which is represented in the results that you see in front of you today, in particular, the bookings graph at the top of the right-hand side of Page 8. The TTV is a little bit more muted than the bookings growth, primarily because, as we have highlighted as part of our strategic initiative over the course of the last couple of years, that we thought the domestic travel market would be the first to recover. As a consequence, we have targeted the domestic market to a much greater extent than we have historically. As such, the domestic travel market has a lower average booking value. That was the first market to recover.
Obviously, leisure has recovered ahead of corporate, and we see that in our business mix, where pre-COVID, it was circa 80/20, leisure versus corporate, and that's shifted to something like 85/15 as we currently speak. As corporate recovers, we'll see that growth and average booking values increase. As we sell more international travel, I suggest that if you look at our results in 12 months' time, you'll see a reversion of this where TTV growth will exceed underlying bookings growth as we sell more longer-haul travel and more long-stay travel and more corporate travel. Let's push on to Slide 9. The results we've just discussed, and we've achieved in FY 2023 didn't occur because we maintained the same structural elements of our business.
Instead, it was a deliberate repositioning during a sustained period of little activity to make us a materially more robust travel partner. We have expanded our addressable market. We have delivered better tech. We have gleaned better insights into our customers' behavior, and that's contributed to the top-line growth that you've seen. As I previously mentioned, the FTE efficiency is 50% greater than we were prior to COVID, and that will continue to improve. We've also tightened our management of risk, all of which has contributed to a business environment in which, for the long term, we are comfortable that we have the components to enable us to achieve our $10 billion TTV target for the WebBeds business. Let's move across to our B2C business units. We'll start with Webjet OTA. Webjet OTA has made a strong return to form in financial year 2023.
The domestic marketplace started the year strongly, but there's been a compression of flight schedules during the course of the second half. International capacity has come on stream during the year, and our web results reflect this supply thematic. We are now back to 81% of pre-pandemic levels, and we have delivered, as we always do, the best OTA EBITDA margins in the world as we have leveraged our brand strength and lowered our cost base. Our environment is materially different, and this compare excludes the Webjet Exclusives business which we no longer operate. It's built into an assumption, as we have discussed over the last couple of years, a changed commission structure environment from our major supply partners.
From this strong base that we've delivered in FY 2023, we see there are significant opportunities for us to improve our profitability at both an EBITDA level and at least maintaining these sort of EBITDA margins that we have delivered during the course of FY 2023. If you move to Slide 12, what it highlights is the impact of high airfares on travel demand. Our performance at Web is emblematic of the contraction of domestic capacity. To put that into sharp relief, in the Australian domestic market had less domestic flights in April 2023 than we did in April 2022. International capacity has increased throughout the year. If you look at our results, you'll see that it's been Q2 onwards, remarkably stable from the domestic flight bookings performance versus pre-COVID.
If you look at Trans-Tasman bookings, strong rebounds in the second half. If you look at the international flight bookings, you see consistent quarter-on-quarter improvement as more capacity comes back into the system. We have a considerable runway to get back to pre-pandemic volumes. To put our results into the context of the broader market, all of our booking numbers and all of our TTV numbers reflect what was booked and traveled in FY 2023. On top of these results, there's been a significant number of credits that we have continued to process throughout the year that we estimate would have contributed to circa 10%-15% of increased bookings and circa more than 15% or greater than 15% of TTV as a consequence that a lot of those flight credits were international credits.
If you added those credits to our underlying numbers, then we would be back to circa pre-pandemic TTV and booking numbers. The other thing to note, which we did call out in the half, was that credits and cancellation have created significant operational impact, which has required us to scale up our customer contact businesses. Those book contacts per bookings are 3x greater than we experienced pre-pandemic. We're delighted to say that the level of operational challenges is subsiding as we speak, and we've reverted to our higher levels and peer group superior levels of customer service operations during the course of Q4 of the last financial year. Moving on to where we see our growth coming from, which is on Page 13, you'll see that our performance against our competitive set has been exceptional.
We are up 59% on all bookings. We have significantly overachieved in the international recovery. Most importantly, the best is yet to come. We have integrated Trip Ninja into the booking flow, and with the expanded product suite of Trip Ninja coming onto the market in FY 2024, we expect to significantly outperform our peers for years to come. The overall Webjet business has withstood all of the challenges that the market has thrown at it over the course of the last three years, and our brand strength has enabled us to maintain our number-one OTA market position, and as I've previously mentioned, outperform the overall market and our peers. If we move to the second of our B2C business units, GoSee. We're seeing that EBITDA has continued to improve with a turnaround of $4.6 million over FY 2022's results.
You see that the GoSee market is hindered by having the least recovered profile of our three business units. We will not get close to pre-pandemic results until inbound tourism levels shoot up towards 100%. At the moment, they are at 65%, and a significant number of those travelers are visiting friends and family, and these folk are unlikely to rent motor homes. Notwithstanding the temporary demand challenges, we have focused the GoSee business on a broad range of strategic initiatives, similar to the transformation program of the WebBeds team. It will enable the GoSee team to deliver a scalable result in a fully recovered market, which we anticipate being in FY 2025, with a growth profile between now and then occurring during FY 2024.
With that, I'll hand across to Tony Ristevski, our CFO, to discuss the financial results in more detail. Over to you, Tony.
Thank you, John. I'll turn everyone's attention to Page 17, where we go straight to the P&L. The attention there being the underlying column whereby, consistent with the first half, we've gone through a series of adjustments to get to an underlying NPAT number, an underlying EPS number. We've excluded the non-operating items, which I'll talk to a bit later on, alongside share-based payments to give us an EBITDA for underlying operations. We've excluded amortization from acquisitions alongside the accounting costs associated with the bifurcation of our convertible bond from the interest line to get to a profit before tax of just over $80 million, and income tax of around $11 million, results in an NPAT number just shy of $70 million, which is north of $100 million of turnaround from NPAT from this time last year.
The way to think about interest going forward is, as I said at the half year, is circa mid-teens overall. We see that slightly progressively climb into the following years as there is a change in tax rate in the UAE, which will mean that that will sort of start to climb up into the high teens over due course, in due time. The DNA adjustment, I talked about that in the first half. We did accelerate the useful life of the platforms, which was detailed in our annual report on note 4.7. That then results in a more normalized DNA for the years ahead, where consistent with the first half, I called out $30 million and $15 million respectively for DNA and AA, and the same applies at the full year for next year's outlook.
Turning to the next slide, the waterfall chart as it relates to cash position on Slide 18. Reflecting back, I've done this slide now 6x in a row. It was first introduced in the first half 2021 results, as a way to demonstrate to the broader committee what our cash burn was, 'cause that was a metric that was a key focus for us at the depth of COVID in terms of the accumulation of cash burnt as a consequence of working capital earnings or losses back then, CapEx, interest and tax, i.e. the cost of keeping the doors open, as it was probably best akin to.
Over time we've gone through and driven a lower number of burn into a positive number, and at the half, that positive number was a consequence of more working capital and then smaller earnings. It's pleasing to see here at the full year, the key driver of our cash surplus is earnings, and that will continue to go forward. $82 million of the $12 million per month came from effectively the profits the business is generating, and a smaller portion came from the working capital benefit. At the first half, we did have a benefit of $102 million, and that's down to $56 million because there is a natural unwind of working capital.
Our TTV in the months of August and September is a lot higher as it is as compared to the months of February and March. As a result, what you find there is we get paid before we pay our suppliers, so you end up having a positive benefit in the first half and that unwinds in the second half. We'll still see that trend going forward as it relates to 2024 as such. The other key positive is we did pay down our debt in the first half of $86 million. If we had not done that, we would have north of $600 million of cash on our balance sheet. We felt it'd be prudent to do that.
Equally at the first half, which is pleasing, and as John said, we've come out of the gates pretty fast, that we did revert to normal covenant testing six months ago, six months ahead of plan. That's been quite positive. Again, thank you to the banks for their support for the last three years. Moving forward to the next slide, corporate costs overall, Slide 19. We did index a bit higher than what we would've anticipated at the half. We did sort of call out $21 million or circa thereabout, and we ended up being just shy of $23 million. Obviously a high compliance cost as it relates to audit and security and the like we incurred in the second half.
Equally as higher short-term benefits as we start to index against our internal results were higher than we expected. We see the run rate in half to continue into the new year. We're guiding towards a number circa $25 million for the next year, and that will in our minds grow with regards to CPI going forward. The technology items there are a combination of Roomex and Trip Ninja. They came in sort of roughly where we thought, which would be sort of just under $5 million for the year. Looking ahead, we expect that number to half for 2024 as it relates to the losses from those two combined businesses as they start to turn around and start to contribute revenue to their cost base, and that will start to mitigate them losses as such.
Moving to the next slide, which is a summary of our non-operating items, which is one-off. The pleasing thing here to say is this will be the last time I'll be going through this slide. The pleasing thing also is we went live with all our financial system upgrades, or be ERP implementations. Collectively across the whole organization, we've replaced, you know, anywhere 10- to 20-year, 30-year-old accounting platforms in B2B, B2C and corporate. Which is pretty exceptional that we have done that in the space of the last couple of years. Now that's behind us. The cost of running the platforms are incurred as part of our BU cost going forward, which would be in the 2024 numbers.
This will be the last time we would be effectively showing a one-off or non-operating item as such. Moving forward to the balance sheet on Slide 23. Sorry, Slide 21. Consistent with the first half, a big focus around cash, a big focus around managing our debtors, they are down relative to September as a consequence of TTV levels overall. Our credit policy has been adhered to and continues to improve with debtor days down from 25% at the half to 30% at the half as compared to pre-COVID levels. Excuse me. Payables are consistently in line with regards to trading at this time of year relative to where we were in September. We paid down our debt, the other key call-out.
The other key items to note is obviously current ratio is a focus of us going forward. Liquidity is a key requirement. For me, looking at this going forward in terms of what does cash look like or what does a healthy balance of cash look like, it's really gonna be governed around a current ratio greater than one. Ensuring that we have enough liquidity to obviously fix the delta between working capital, that was detrimental to us three years ago. We take a different perspective and a more cautious perspective going forward as such. Turning to the next slide on cash flow. This is just a table representing the waterfall from the earlier slide.
The only things to call out here is obviously the contribution from earnings being a major contributor to our cash this year, and that will continue to be the case going forward. The other thing to call out here is we've not declared a dividend for 2023. We're taking a very cautious approach with the impending first put of the bond, which is due in April of 24. In our mind, with the share price where it is, it's obviously in a more positive position, but we can't control what the markets do. Therefore, it would be prudent of us to sit on the cash for the next 12 months and await that decision from our bondholders.
At that point in time, this time next year, we'll have more to say as it relates to where we would go with the cash on our balance sheet. The key thing there is it might be a bit boring, but it's probably more conservative at this point in time to preserve that and give us all the optionality we need to deal with that event should it arise in 12 months from now. Going forward onto the next slide being CapEx. We did spend a bit more than what we anticipated at the half. We did indicate at the half that spend would be around sort of circa $30 million.
The B2B guys did spend a bit more in the second half as it relates to the unification of their platforms and some of the foundational investment that went along with it. The pleasing thing there is, you know, going forward, it has delivered the benefits to the business that John outlined earlier in terms of scalability. For us going forward, the outlook for CapEx will be circa $39 million, close enough to 70% of that will be in the B2B space as we continually invest in that. The rest will be in the B2C space. In all, thank you, I'll hand it back to John.
Thank you, Tony. The Webjet team has demonstrated incredible resilience and skill to deliver the results in FY 2023. Together with our supply partners, our customers, our consumers, and other stakeholders, we are fortified in the knowledge that we delivered a superior result over the last six months. The first seven weeks of the new year do not change any of the underlying metrics of our business. They fill us with even greater confidence that FY 2024 will continue to see us significantly exceed our pre-pandemic results. As of May 19, WebBeds is up over 40% at a TTV level and greater than 35% at a bookings level compared to the same period in FY 2023, which indicates a reversal of the declining average booking values in FY 2023 as we proportionately sell more long stay and international hotels.
The Webjet OTA business is up greater than 30% at a TTV level and greater than 10% at a bookings level on FY 2023 as we continue to sell more international flights. The contrast is GoSee is up 5% at TTV and 15% at bookings as we see more supply come into the rental car market, resulting in lower average booking values. The outlook for us is very positive in the context of all three businesses have had a remarkable rebound from FY 2022, and we've covered off the results in FY 2023. We have said previously that we would exceed pre-COVID numbers on a full year basis in FY 2024. We are now saying that we will significantly exceed FY 2024 numbers and all three business units will improve substantially on their underlying performance in FY 2023.
With that, Rachel, I would like to thank everyone for listening to our presentation and if you could open up questions at this time.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from John O'Shea with Ord Minnett. Please go ahead. Please go ahead, John. Your line is in. Talk.
Morning, John and Tony. Can you hear me okay?
We can hear you, John.
Yeah. Thank you. Very well done on the result. A couple of questions from me. Firstly, the CapEx side, interested there in your thoughts as to the importance of that, the relevance to Webjet and where you're trying to position yourselves moving forward, given your, sort of, original, sort of, base as being a, sort of, a tech-oriented company, I guess. Secondly, when we look at FY 2025, is it fair to say that 2024 is like a transition year in many ways in terms of the trajectory towards a normalized travel environment? Do you think that's the right way to think about it, given that we know there's still capacity constraints, China's not out there, Japan, all of those things? How should we think about 2024 in the context of that picture relating to 2025?
If you know what I mean. I guess the first one on the CapEx side, the importance and relevance to your company and how we should think about that.
I'll give both questions a go, John, and if I miss anything, Tony can chip in. On the CapEx side, where you're seeing in Slide 23 that CapEx is up on FY 2022, but we're still below pre-COVID levels, but we will definitely be up in FY 2024. It's a reflection of our desire to extend the lead that we have in the recovery thematic. The broader opportunity which we have discussed at numerous strategy days, in particular on the B2B strategy day, is to deliver a business that can scale up to AUD 10 billion in TTV. To deliver that, you need market-leading tech initiatives, and you need to address specific opportunities in the broader market that a singular, monolithic tech stack could never achieve.
We are utilizing the CapEx, and predominantly the growth is on the B2B side, to achieve that strategic outcome. Your summation is very apt. We've always been a travel tech business, and our great skill has been in taking disparate content from global suppliers and packaging it in a way that either consumers in the Webjet brand or travel companies in the WebBeds business can digest it more efficiently than anybody else. That opportunity, notwithstanding any of the tech innovations around AI and market initiatives that we currently see occurring in the travel business, is not gonna disappear. The consequence is we will continue to invest in the capital, in our CapEx profile, but that investment in CapEx will be substantially below...
Sorry, that incremental investment in CapEx will be substantially below the underlying EBITDA growth profile of our business. Tony, anything else you wanna add?
No, that's true. The correlation area is it will grow with inflation and EBITDA will grow materially a lot higher.
to move to the second question.
The way we think about 2024 in the trajectory to 2025, I guess.
The travel market is circa 85% fully recovered. Leisure is circa, you know, 100% fully recovered on a global basis, and corporate is circa 75%-80% fully recovered or 75% recovered. There are two elements to the question. There is geographically, what's going to happen? You pick the two biggest markets that are least recovered, the two biggest global contributors to the overall tourism marketplace in China and Japan are a long way from getting back to pre-COVID levels. At the end of financial year 2024 for us, we think that China will only have circa 50% of its international outbound capacity. Even into FY 2025, we're not expecting a fully recovered international outbound China market. The Japanese market would have a similar kind of trajectory.
While both are open, both are operating well below 30% of its pre-COVID capacity as we speak today. That is potential upside to the recovery of the market. The second element, which is, which I touched on, is the corporate market. We're expecting to see a stronger rebound in FY 2024 from the corporate market because it is still trading in the broadest global sense, dramatically below where it was in a pre-pandemic environment.
Thank you, John. Thanks, Tony.
Thank you, John.
Your next question comes from Tim Plumbe with UBS. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Congratulations. Just two questions from me, if possible, please. John, both around the B2B business. The first one, can you talk a little bit about the improved conversion rates that you're seeing against your historical customer base? I don't know if it's possible to split it out when you think of that growth that's come through from, you know, existing customers versus new geographies/new customers that have been brought on board?
Yeah, no problem. Again, the summation is we are selling to new customers. You know, we call out in the deck that Europe is up 10%. 10% of the growth that we achieved in Europe is from new customers. North America is up threefold. That's new customers that we didn't have pre-pandemic. APAC, the customer mix has changed, and Middle East, the customer mix has changed less dramatically. If we exclude Middle East from that conversation, you're seeing us win on the following two different parameters. Point number one is more customers in existing geographic mix and winning share from existing customers. Let's talk about more customers.
The growth profile that we touched on in the first half, and we called out in our strategy day last year, is that there's been a significant shift to OTA customers and a decline in traditional tour operators vis-a-vis our pre-pandemic numbers. We're not seeing an acceleration of that in the second half. We're just seeing a consolidation of what happened in the first half. Where we did see a significant acceleration is in North American bookings as we rolled out Merchant of Record solutions for our customers in that particular marketplace. The second element, and the more gratifying one for many reasons within our existing business, is the increased share and the conversion number that you just made reference to from our existing customers.
One of the things that the Webjet business has taken the opportunity of refining is the relevance of the direct contracts that we've been able to procure. We've refined that over the course of the last couple of years. We're seeing that we're able to make better offers at the right time to our customers. We're winning greater share as a consequence of that. We think that is the longer-term gain. There will be plenty of new customers that we will add, but winning our share of wallet in our existing customers will be the major contributor to getting to that AUD 10 billion TTV target that we've made reference to previously. Was that both your questions, Tim, or was that just one of two?
That was the first one. The second one was just if you can touch a little bit on the competitive environment that you're seeing in the B2B space, both at the top end and that long tail, please.
It's always difficult because we're the only publicly traded business that carves out the B2B results as we do. Any commentary I make here is, I don't do with a high degree of conviction. What I can say, and as you would have seen in our results, is we've been able to dramatically increase the bookings growth rate in the second half versus the first half, and we've been able to do that at increased Revenue TTV margins. We're not seeing pricing pressure being put on our business at this point. We think the sort of, you know, above 8% Revenue TTV margin is sustainable for FY 2024. I previously, you know, would've indicated around eight. We're now saying it'll be greater than 80 for FY 2024.
We have a high degree of confidence around our competitiveness, which is influencing pricing. We're very happy that we will continue to win share, we'll continue to grow our business, and we'll do it at a reasonable margin. We will do that without the significant growth in expenses that you saw in the second half, which was a reflection of a couple of things that occurred in our business. One is it's the first time in three years that we paid short-term incentives to all of our employees, and that was a significant contributor to the expense increase. The Merchant of Record that I made reference to in the presentation also increased significantly in the second half. We had annualization and CPI increases as we've brought our business back to scale.
You know, to put that into contrast, you know, we operated with circa 2,550 people pre-pandemic, and we're back to 2,200, but at greater volume. That just shows all the effort that the team has put in is delivering greater efficiency across the board for our business.
That's great. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Tim.
The next question comes from Ben Gilbert with Jarden. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. Just following on from the prior stuff you're talking about, trying to understand around expenses. If we think about that second half run rate, what sort of capacity does that give you on TTV? Like, should we sort of think about that AUD 69 million running through as sort of into first half of 2024 or continuing to ramp as you sort of build towards that ability to do AUD 10 billion at TTV in time?
I think the best way to think about it, that sort of AUD 69 will sort of grow with inflation into the second half, or into the first half of 2024, and so forth into 2024 half two. The volumes will be materially higher year-on-year, as it relates to that second half in 2023- 2024. You can see that in the first week's trade. That's probably the best directional sort of guidance I can give you there in terms of how to think about expenses for Webjet.
Then just following on from that in terms of the productivity. I think you gave some numbers around sort of bookings for FTE and sort of those mid to low 800s at your strategy day last year. I think you said you're running, what, 50% higher? With the investment you guys are putting in systems, do you have a view on where best in class is in terms of productivity per FTE? Like, could you be pushing to 2,000? What sort of numbers should we be thinking?
Well, I'll answer it historically and then move to what we're doing today. If you go through our results pre-pandemic, we always said we were the low-cost provider in our WebBeds space. We're now at least 50% better than that. I don't know what best in class is, but I know nobody in our industry is doing what we deliver. We've had anecdotal feedback about what that looks like in other businesses, and we're very comfortable that we've got capacity to improve our numbers. We're at +50%, you know, FTE per booking greater efficiency today. You know, when we're sitting here in 12 months time, I wouldn't be surprised if we're, you know, 20% better than that.
They're the sorts of numbers that we would expect. I think the year following, we could be another 20% better than that again. All the things that we have delivered in unifying the tech platform have contributed to that on the WebBeds side. All the things that Tony spoke about in integrating back-end accounting and ERP solutions across the board will minimize the need to invest in human resources as we grow our business. Most importantly, out of all of that, which, you know, overarches all of our thinking, is that we needed to do all of this to get a business that's gonna deliver $10 billion in TTV.
We would never have been able to do it at the rate that we now can deliver against it as a consequence of the changes that we've made. We're very comfortable that our efficiency stats will continue to improve over the medium term, and our business will continue to scale, and our growth rate expenses, especially at the employee line, will be moderate in comparison to the overall growth rates of the business. The expenses that we don't control are things like search cost, which is a major contributor. You know, when you're doing billions of searches on our website each day, and that's all being expensed through cloud-based providers, that's an expense that, again, was significantly up in the second half or the first half.
You expect that to continue as we explore and expand into new markets.
Probably not a bad problem to have to see those costs continue to rise.
Absolutely. Look, we're delighted with the underlying metrics of the business, and we're happy that, whilst there is a half-on-half increase, as Tony suggested, going forward, it'll be more moderate in comparison to what we're going to achieve with increased conversion rates on the sales side.
That's great. Just one final one from me. Just on the, on the Webjet and the OTA business, the Revenue TTV margin, I think you said at the heart you thought you could still get back to that 9%-10% range. Is that still the aspiration as you see more international, more add-ons, et cetera, coming through in that part of the business?
Yeah. It's a good question. We think it'll get closer. It'll improve. We'd like it to be between nine and 10. We need the market to be more fully recovered to have a high degree of confidence. We would expect as the second half FY 2024 reveals itself to us, that we would expect that we would get greater revenues than we did in FY 2023 as the amount of international increases. Correct. International is higher margin, albeit not as great a delta as existed pre-pandemic because of the loss of front-end commissions from a number of international carriers. It is still higher margin than domestic, but not as great as it was.
That's sort of a work in progress, and we'll probably give a little bit more color to that at the half-year results.
Great. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
Thanks, Ben.
The next question comes from Sam Seow with Citibank. Please go ahead.
Hi, John. Hi, Tony. Congrats on the result. Couldn't help notice that despite, I guess, the great result, the ABV was still down 20%. I know you provided some color there on some factors, just wanted to understand what level you think that ABV can get back to versus pre-pandemic after some of those, I guess, temporary factors unwind. That includes, I guess, the structural and strategic shifts you've made there, you know, in geographic and customer mix.
Sam, the ABV, we would be probably one of the few, if not the only travel businesses in the world that's got a lower average booking value in when we're selling hotel rooms. That's purely mix. It's got nothing to do with the underlying average booking value. Every hotel just about in the world is selling at a higher rate than it was pre-pandemic. That's a given. As I touched on in the presentation, and I'll expand a little bit more fulsomely now, when we thought about the recovery dynamic in, you know, 2020 and 2021, we thought that domestic tourism would be the leading indicator or the leading recovery indicator. As a consequence, we shifted our resources and addressed the market that previously we had underserved.
Domestic was circa, I'm doing this contemporaneously, so I don't have the exact number in front of me. I think domestically, we were sort of 10%-15% of our overall business in FY 2019, and it's sort of circa more than double that in FY 2023. The consequence of a domestic business is not that the booking value is less, it's just that the length of stay is lower, so the average booking value is lower as a consequence. That's reflected in our results. Nothing to do with pricing. Our margin on those bookings, as we've highlighted, is still 8.4% over the full year, which is healthy. What we will see in FY 2024, and we're already seeing it in the outlook, is that TTV is tracking ahead of bookings.
That's a consequence of us now selling proportionately more international than we did at the same time last year. You gotta remember, at the same time last year, April and May of 2022, you know, Omicron had just had its first wave, and we were in the start of the recovery process. Again, disproportionately, we had more domestic, and now we're selling more international. That's the reason why average booking values are a little bit unusual in our results versus everybody else's.
Got it. I guess just to confirm, the underlying domestic ABV hasn't changed versus pre-pandemic, the average underlying international ABV hasn't changed versus pre-pandemic.
Both average price per room in domestic, average price for international are higher than pre-pandemic. Our results reflect a multiple of one night typical domestic stay instead of a four-night typical international stay. That is driving the reduced average booking value. Ours is just a reflection of bookings as divided by room nights that creates a lower average booking value. If you looked at a hotel room basis, they're all up.
Got it. Got it. I think just on OTA, I mean, the Trip Ninja there, it's a great acquisition. I mean, my understanding is you could probably price that product wherever you want, given the customer can't see it. Just wondering, can you recoup, I guess, some of the commission changes? Will you not sell, I guess, a material enough % of that product to make a difference to the overall revenue margin?
To go back to Ben's comment, Ben's question earlier about what are we gonna do or when are we gonna get back to a higher revenue TTV margin for the Webjet business. One of the levers I suggested that we had was international. That is Trip Ninja being able to offer, as you put it, a recouping of some of the commission cuts that we've had.
That is what we're currently experimenting with in our B2C models, and we expect that to be a contributor, that's why I said there'd be greater clarity about the answer in the half year results, 'cause we will have had six months better understanding of how we can price the delta between the savings and what our take rates are for those savings for the consumer. That will contribute to increasing our revenue to TTV margins going forward.
Got it. Thanks for that, guys. Congrats on the result.
Thanks, Sam.
Thanks, Sam.
The next question comes from Darshana Nair with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Hi, team. First of all, just a clarification around your longer-term thoughts on the 8/3/5 . How significant was that Merchant of Record business as an impact on the revenue margins currently? Has it actually helped accelerate the path towards how you're thinking about the $10 billion TTV?
Sorry, Darshana, can I just get you to repeat the question? I'm not sure I understood it.
Yeah. It's for like how significant is that Merchant of Record, actually impacting your revenue margin? You said that it's inflated the revenue margin, also inflated the cost. Just keen to understand what the impact was.
Tony, do you wanna go through the MOR story?
Darshana, the way to think about it is there is obviously an on cost added to the normal trading margin, which reflects the Merchant of Record fees that we've bought bearing the P&L. As an example, if the trading margin could be hypothetically, say, 6% and Merchant of Record 3%, it makes you have a gross revenue there of 9%. As a, as a working example, I'm not saying that's the, that's the reality, but that would be the example. That 3% will also go through the expense line as well. That has that consequence that John mentioned earlier, where revenue margins are inflated as opposed to what we guided at the half. Obviously, cost is inflated, the consequence of that recognition of expense.
The other way I think about it is that notwithstanding the ins and the outs that Tony's just described, our EBITDA margins actually improved substantially in FY 2023 compared to any period in FY 2022. Whilst we're not guiding to an EBITDA margin number for all the reasons that I outlined, that 8/3/5 is obsolete in the current environment with all the things that we're trying to do, all the markets we're trying to address and how those markets operate, we still will have market-leading EBITDA margins. In fact, global market-leading EBITDA margins. In fact, I can't think of a publicly traded business in the travel sector that has market-leading global margins that we have. That's the context in which we're operating.
We will have superior margins going forward, but we're gonna address specific market opportunities which make the orthodoxy around our thinking of 8/3/5 , which was first, pithy, and two, directionally correct, no longer relevant to the strategy that or the tactics that we're executing on a day-to-day basis.
Okay. Thank you. Secondly, I guess previously you've mentioned that booking lead times and cancellations were much shorter, you know, because as you recovered through COVID. How does this compare with the pre-COVID levels now, when you think about second half 2023?
Sorry, Tony.
Sorry, I didn't, we missed that question. Push on it. Can you repeat it? Apologies there.
No worries. Just asking about how the booking lead times and cancellations are now looking on the Webjet business?
Oh, I see. Yeah.
post the COVID. Yeah.
Well, it's again, excellent question because one of the things that's greatly changed over the course of the last four years is the booking lead time on the WebBeds business has been compressed substantially. Cancellation rates are roughly the same, booking lead times are substantially below what they were pre-COVID. In pre-COVID days, I had great insight. Firstly, the market operated much more consistently on a year-on-year comparison basis, which filled me with greater confidence in making predictions. Secondly, we had, you know, bookings further out as well. That has all changed in the post-COVID world. We are operating on much more compressed booking timeframe, therefore we don't have the same visibility that we had.
Plus the markets are still going through the gyrations of returning to more normal environments. That, that has been a change.
Maybe just, you know, directionally, has this improved versus what you saw in the first half?
It's similar to the first half.
Okay, thank you.
I think we've got time for one more question. Rachel?
Yes. The next question is from Wei-Weng Chen with RBC. Please go ahead.
Hi, John. Just a question from me about the, you know, targeting EBITDA margins to EBITDA dollars. As we transition to this way of thinking, is there any expectation that margins might go backwards or are you focused at the very least in defending existing margins?
No. Margins going backwards, defending existing margins, margin targets are all obsolete as objectives. If I go to, you know, the more prosaic we want, we're gonna sell more stuff to more people, and we'll deliver more EBIT at the end of each half on half. That's the underlying driver. To go back to Darshana's question, we will still deliver the best EBITA margins in the industry. We'll still deliver phenomenal EBIT margins in travel. That's not gonna change, but we're not going to say 49 is good, 48 is bad. We're not gonna be focused on that as an outcome. You know, we will do things in the markets that will incrementally improve our bottom-line results, and that's what we're gonna focus on.
Yeah. Okay. Thanks. If I could squeeze in one more. Just the 40% growth rate in B2B, do comps at some point start to normalize for you guys, or do you think you can continue to sort of grow at that rate for the rest of the half or year?
Sorry, the 40% in B2B or B2C we want?
B2B. Do comps at some point start to normalize for that business? Or do you think you can sustain that level of growth?
Yeah, good question. It's the great unknown. I'll give you that answer in about May of 2024. That's probably where we'll end up. Without going to a quantitative outcome, but at quality, we will have, across all three businesses, increased TTV. We'll have increased bookings, we will deliver substantially better EBITDA results across all three business units. The WebBeds one will outperform because the global opportunity is still enormous. It's untapped, and our ability to convert at a higher rate will be the driver of the aggregate result for the Webjet Limited business. What that number will be, you know, time will tell.
All right. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Wei-Weng. Rachel, I think that's it. In wrapping up, I'd like to thank everyone for listening and, enjoy your day. Cheers.